Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published _Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he wanted at the time and in the place.
But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply something like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not as Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really universal language which fits all times and persons because it is universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this latter. For historical creations (the most important of his non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary, literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be "up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.